How To Start Affiliate Marketing The Right Way

Beginners Guide To Start Affiliate Marketing: 6 Step Roadmap ciarandoyle.com/start-affiliate-marketing-right/

So you’re eager to start an online business.

You have done your research and discovered that affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online.

But you don’t know how or where to get started. In this post, We’re going to go over the 6 Step Roadmap to start affiliate marketing today.

What you will be learning in this post is the basics of what made my business take off and helped me make over $10,000 in 28 days.

These are the fundamentals that will transform your affiliate marketing from a complete beginner to someone who can create a life that they are proud of and the Freedom to enjoy their lives.

And no matter what market (Or niche) you’re entering, you’ll be able to find an angle that will create profit.

This can usually be discovered by looking at any given niche within a market, checking out who your potential competition will be, and identifying how best to beat that competition.

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As you start to dominate the serach engines for multiple keywords related to your niche that’s when the real money starts rolling in.

As you continue to take action, creating more content and ranking more keywords, you will be able to start earning enough income to take care of your expenses. This can even lead to you quitting your job (like so many others have) if you want to go in full time.

How Affiliate Marketing Works Affiliate marketing is an online business model where a company or product creator offers to pay you a certain percentage for making a sale of their product. You don’t even have to have your own products, that’s why this business model is the best for anyone starting an online business.

It’s not hard for to make money with affiliate marketing, the process is simple, but there are niggly little bits that can slow down people new to the process;

1. Create good looking affiliate website, 2. Create great entertaining content that offers so much value to your audience, 3. Drive traffic to your website, 4. Convert those website visitors to affiliate sales.

But many affiliates don’t follow this route and that’s why most of them (Let’s hope not you) don’t make any sales or if they do make sales, never really consistent affiliate commissions.

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Affiliate marketing the way my students and I do it, is basically ranking for more keywords on search engines and driving loads of traffic to our website, then keeping them engaged in our content long enough that we can recommend products to them that will enable them to go from point A to B. A = coming to the website for the first time, B = buying a recommendation that you have on yoru site.

What is an affiliate link?

An affiliate link is a unique tracking ID that the company gives you to track every single visitor you sent to their business and when someone clicks over through and buys, you get paid.

An affiliate link looks like this:

The question now remains how can you get people to start clicking on your affiliate link?

There are two main ways to do this: Free or Organic Traffic, Paid Traffic.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?

Affiliate marketing is easy if you follow the proper steps. BUT, You will have to work hard in the beginning.

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It requires a lot of time to build a successful business. It isn’t difficult, but takes time, and if you stick with it, you will be rewarded with the benefits of money, time and freedom to enjoy your life.

The Six Step Roadmap

There are different steps in this roadmap that you’ll have to go through to get your website set up and start making predictable monthly income online.

Six Steps To Start Affiliate Marketing Step 1: Finding Your Niche, Step 2: Analyzing Your Competition, Step 3: Your Content, Step 4: Your Website, Step 5: Conversion, Step 6: Email marketing.

Step 1: Finding Your Niche Why Niching Down Is Important The first thing to do when getting started with affiliate marketing is to know which markets to enter. My advice…

You should follow your passion and choose a niche you’re interested in.

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The whole process becomes much easier and fun when you’re passionate about your niche and have so much to talk about.

Once you have chosen your niche market passion the nextthing you need to do is… niching down and narrowing your audience makes affiliate marketing more profitable. So, let’s say you’re passionate about fitness and want to go into the fitness market.

Fitness is a huge market, there are too many competitors that will crush you as a beginner because they know more about the market and also have a big team behind their brand.

Imagine competing with top influencers on social media platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, etc with a very huge followings. So what can you do about this?

You have to find a way to stand out from the crowd, and you can do this by narrowing down a broad niche to a very tight sub-niche that is less competitive, you easily dominate, and rank keywords on Google.

When you find a sub-niche, you need to do a quick Google search to determine if there’s a market for your sub-niche or simply if people are searching for information about what you have to say.

Then you build a website with conversion-focused material (more on this later) and start getting traffic and selling your affiliate products.

How To Niche Down To More Profitable Sub-Niches Let’s say you have chosen the Fitness market, then you have to niche down two times or i call it to niche down two levels.

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The first niche down is “Fitness for ladies” and the second niche down is “over 50”. So your niche now becomes “Fitness for ladies over 50.

This simply means you start with the fitness market and then you narrow it down to “Fitness for ladies”, and narrow it even further to “Fitness for ladies over 50”.

Step 2: Analyze The Competition

I want you to know that having competition is good for your busines, but too much of it can be bad. Having competition shows that the sub-niche you have chosen is profitable and people are making money from it.

In that light, what you need to do after narrowing down your niche is to find your competition and try to figure out what they’re doing, and find ways to make your website and offers better.

Sometimes you will notice that your competitors are doing most things wrong (and that can be really great) but it all comes down to knowing how you can find those things. Look at the things they’re doing and make them better.

Find Your Competitors By Searching On Google If you search your main keyword on Google (your niche), you will see a list of websites that rank for that keyword. This should give us a good idea of how competitive it is and what you’ll be up against.

Here’s how Google works;

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Google analyzes billion different websites and finds the most relevant website to your search.

And, they would list 10 websites on the first page whom they think are the most relevant page to the key term being searched and those are your top competitors for that keyword.

Since Google is telling you the best websites that are ranking for your main topic, what do you do with this information?

Dominate Your Competition When many people go into a market or a new business, they don’t spend time researching their competition and finding out how to beat them. And that’s why most people fail especially in affiliate marketing.

However, the formula that I use makes the whole process so simple, You just leverage the work your competitors have done and make yours better.

So how do you do this?

First of all, search in Google for your main keyword, Open each of the top five websites ranking for your main keyword in a new tab. Go through them one by one and find out what they’re doing in terms of their: Word count on the page, Keywords, Images, Videos, Page structure.

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And then, you do an aggregate of the five websites and make yours 10 to 20% better.

For example, if You have done an aggregate of the word count across the top 5 websites, add 10 to 20% more content to it. The tool I use to discover the word count and keyword usage of these top websites is called SEOBOOK which basically shows you what your competitors are doing with their keywords.

Go through the same process and make your images, videos and page structure better.

With this method, you know exactly what to do to beat your competition and rank higher on Google.

Then, you start getting loads of traffic to your website and converting them to sales if you have good content. I believe Google shows you everything you need to succeed.

Step 3: Creating Great Website Content

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What is Good Website Content? The 3 E’s In terms of affiliate marketing or marketing in general, good content is content that is optimized for search engines (SEO) and constantly brings targeted organic traffic to your website.

Most importantly good content should be able to do the following: Educate, Entertain, Earn.

Good content should be able to entertain the reader to get their attention and keep them interested long enough to educate them and then finally get them to buy something from you (earn).

Why is Good Website Content Important?

With good content you can convert your website visitors into buyers. You might have an amazing affiliate offer that you believe will help your audience but if you don’t create good content, you won’t get many visitors due to poor SEO and they won’t buy.

Good website content always gets more traffic because of the value it offers and when website visitors get so much value from your content, they automatically wants to share it with their friends.

The more referral you get, the more traffic you receive, and most importantly, Google now sees that people are loving and sharing your content, they push it up the search engines, which means even more traffic to your website.

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Look, it doesn’t matter if you’re a writer, a graphic designer, or a video creator, you can still use any of those skills, you can even talk and get it transcribed using platforms like Rev. And, if you’re not good at coming up with ideas, you can still find great ideas for your content by checking your competitors and searching Google for inspiration.

What if you’re not able to create content? There are other ways to get already created good content that you can use for your website.

YouTube Videos: Search your content topic on youtube and select the video that best matches your topic, then transcribes it and uses it for your Content.

AI Generated Content: You can find lots of AI content writers online just by searching on Google but I would recommend you use Jasper AI. Get Freelance Content Writers.

Step 4: Building Your Website Why Is Website Important For Affiliate Marketing?

Your website is like your home for your Affiliate Marketing business.

When you build your Affiliate Marketing business on the back of Facebook and other social media platforms, one day, they can decide to change their guidelines and when your post doesn’t meet their new guidelines or for any other reason, they can block you from their platform.

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I have seen people lose their whole business in one night because Facebook disabled their Facebook page or their ad account.

For example, Recently, Facebook disabled an account that I have used for over 10 years and I lost access to all my pages and all the audience I have already built on those pages.

Believe me, this SUCKS! Don’t get me wrong I like Facebook, and you have to leverage Facebook as well, as Facebook gets billions of visitors every month and it would be the wrong move for yoru busienss if you don’t leverage it to grow your audience.

But you have to find a way to get people from Facebook back to your website and capture them through email marketing (which we’re going to talk about in a minute) to turn them into traffic you own.

How Do I Create An Affiliate Website?

You need a few things including: 1. A domain name, 2. Hosting, 3. WordPress.

A domain name is the name of yoru website, like: ciarandoyle.com or Facebook.com.

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Hosting is what your website lives on. Every website needs this to be online and people find it. This is a paid service, and the one I use and recommend for my students is called Dreamhost.

You can pick up Dreamhost at a massively discounted rate through the link here, which also gives you a free domain name and loads fo other things.

Note: If you get DH through my link here, send me an email via the contact form, showing me that you purchased DH, along with your transaction ID and I have a special gift for you.

When you get your hosting through DH, you will also get WordPress for free, and easy to setup with a simple click of a button.

Step 5: Website Conversion What Is Website Conversion? And Why It Matters Let’s say you’re promoting an affiliate product, and by the end of the month, you receive about 100 website visitors.

When 10 of those people buy from you, we say your website conversion rate is 10%. But what if those people come to your website, read your content, liked it but didn’t buy, so what happened?

You have not added necessary website conversion elements that help convert those visitors to sales or leads.

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Since conversion is the goal of any online business, especially affiliate marketing, and if your website is not converting, very soon you will be out of business.

How can you improve your website Conversion Rate?

I recommend two main ways to do this: Use Strong Call to Action: A CTA tells people what action to take next, it might be to subscribe to your email list or to click a link and buy an affiliate offer. Sometimes what people need is to be shown the right direction and you can do that by using a strong call to action.

Include Social Proof: People buy when they see other people have bought, so add reviews and testimonials for people to read and see that others have bought and have been happy with their purchase.

Step 6: Email marketing What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing also called permission marketing is a direct marketing channel, that allows you to share new products, updates, and information with your customers on your contact list. It has a very high ROI which makes any online business not leveraging it look unprofessional.

Now, email marketing has evolved making it easier for you to target different segments of your audience and put the right message in front of them.

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Why Email Marketing Is Important It helps you bring back visitors to your website who haven’t taken any action yet.

It makes it easy to communicate and inform your customers or maybe offer more education to build trust with your list and you can do this any time you want.

It enables you to send targeted or personalized messages to your audience.

It enables you to build relationships and connections with your audience.

Email marketing is measurable and scalable.

What’s Next On Your Journey And there you have it, that is all you really need to get started building your own online business using affiliate marketing.

Once you have done all this process effectively, you will have your own business, start to rank higher in search engines, and get your site into the first and second positions for multiple different keywords.

You will begin to get exposure since your main goal is to get visitors to your website who love your content and then convert them into sales.

That’s when you start making that income you always dreamed of.

I’m so excited to have shared this roadmap with you because these steps are going to be the same for the next 10 years in terms of understanding, beating your competition, and succeeding with affiliate marketing.

This is a process you will follow and you will always be two steps ahead of your competition both in traffic and conversion.

Are you ready to start your affiliate marketing journey? In the next post, I will walk you through ClickBank Affiliate marketing and how to succeed even if you’re a beginner.

If you liked this post, comment below and let us know your biggest takeaway from this post and how it has helped you.

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